Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/467



EX CAPITAL OF PARAGUAY. 437

nullahs. I thought involuntarily of the streams that are taught to run down the wide avenues of Salt Lake City. They arc divided by bands of the roughest yellow or red sandstone grit (sangre de boi), sections of a mountain torrent, into parallelograms of sloppy mud and ooze, where guns and cattle stick. Here and there is a paved ramp of impracticable slope, and nowhere can a carriage be used. Offals lie all about : there is a dead animal in each line ; and where carts pass the wheels are often bogged in the quag- mire. The Brazilians declare that they have improved the streets, which they found overgrown with grass and weeds. Like all public works at Asuncion, nothing can be viler than the thoroughfares, and remember that I visited them in the heart of the " dries. "^

A few paces lead us to the old Cathedral, now the Encar- nacion Church. Curious to say, no fane has been raised to San Bias, patron of Paraguay, and even San Francisco Solano, who in 1589 reached Asuncion, has not won the honour of a chapel. The shape is truly Paraguayan; a single belfry to the south boasts of more than usual pic- turesqueness : the simple old Spanish fa9ade, pointing east, with the spacious tiled atrio, and the three-arched porch leading to the doors, has the improvement of a more massive cornice than is usual in South America, and the body is a long dorsum of red tiles. The colours are pink and blue upon a white ground, forming the national tricolor, which we everywhere see at Asuncion, and the material is brick upon ashlar of boulders. To the north is a garden and lodgings for the Sor Cura, but both are sadly dilapidated. Inside the church the naves appear far too wide, and the rules of proportion are evidently ignored. The pulpit, font, and confessionals are of quaint forms, manifestly not modern. During mass, the worshippers, as everywhere in these regions, were separated by sex; similarly St. Charles Borrcmseus